The 9th annual Latino Heritage Festival was this weekend. Something new they added this year "Dancing with the Celebrities". I was one of eight competitors to take the stage. We each got paired up with a local professional dancer, they picked the style of dance and song and we had a six hour crash course to learn our dance. I danced the cha cha and had a total blast. This was way outside of my comfort zone and to tell you the truth I was super nervous to dance in front of anyone but my immediate family and dance partner, Manuel Cabrejos. My daughter Lydia watched me practice in her playroom all week and would dance right there with me, lets just say at a year and a half, she has better rhythm. Manuel was so patient and such a great teacher. Outside of being a full time college student at Iowa State he's also a professional salsa dancer. If you ever need to take any sort of dance lesson I highly recommend him. You can find him at Salsa Des Moines.
So for the actual competition, we all danced one by one and then after the scores were tallied half of us were cut...including me. Ah, it was fun while it lasted. Congrats to the winner Fabiola Pastorino!
As my husband told me, for six hours of learning something I've never done before I did the best I could. I'm kind of sad its all over...hmmm maybe salsa lessons are in my future!
I've talked about this so much the last few weeks I'm sure the newsroom is sick of hearing about it, but I think I have one of the celebrities for next year signed up...my co-anchor Amanda Krenz is ready to put her dancing shoes on! Watch out!
Thanks for reading!
Rachel Pierce
